Last Thursday, July 16th, SourceForge suffered an outage due a storage fault. 5 days later the problem is not fixed yet. They restored some services but the project web is still offline. People trying to visit smplayer.sourceforge.net will get this screen:

So they aren’t able to download SMPlayer from the official website. The downloads from fosshub.com (where the stable packages for Windows are stored) have dropped to almost 0.

So to try to prevent this to happen again in the future, I think the best would be to host the SMPlayer website outside of SourceForge. Actually it already has been uploaded to smplayer.es.

This blog, the forum, the SVN repository, the stable downloads are already outside of SourceForge.

Due to changes in YouTube, the old SMTube doesn’t work anymore. A new version has been developed, written from scratch. You can download it from http://smtube.sourceforge.net

For the moment only basic functionality is included: search and browse categories. But new features will be added in the future.

In this new version you can choose which media player to use to play the YouTube videos. And you can add more in the settings dialogs. This is an explanation of the data you have to enter to edit or add a player:

Name: this is the name that will be displayed in the context menu: “Open with <name>”Executable: the binary name (a full path is allow) that should be run. For example: mplayer or /usr/bin/mplayer or mplayer.exe (Windows).Parameters: the parameters that should be passed to the application. There are some special characters that SMTube will replace:

%u (the URL of the video)

%t (the title of the video)

%f (a string that can be used as output filename, usually it’s the title + mp4 extension)

%t and %f should only be used when the option “this player supports videos sites” is NOT checked. (See below)

This player supports videos sites: can be checked or unchecked. If it’s checked this means that the player is smart enough to find out the video URL from the YouTube page. When checked SMTube just passes (with %u) the URL of the YouTube page, it’s up to the player to find out the real address of the video. If the option is not checked then SMTube will find out the URL of the video and pass it to the player. For example, SMPlayer, mpv+youtube-dl and VLC can find out the URL of the video, so this option should be checked for them. On the other hand mplayer doesn’t support YouTube so you have to leave this option unchecked.

Notice that due to the terms of use of the YouTube API, this version doesn’t include any option to download videos. But you can read this article to find out how to add it:

Due to changes in YouTube, the old SMTube doesn’t work anymore. A new version has been developed, written from scratch. You can download it from http://smtube.sourceforge.net

But now people are asking “is possible to download videos with this new version?”Short answer: yes, but you have to configure it. Please, continue reading.

The new SMTube uses the YouTube API v.3. In order to use this API it’s necessary to ask Google for a “developer key”. And you have to accept their terms of use. Those terms of use don’t allow to implement applications to download videos. So I can’t add any function to download videos from YouTube.

But this new version includes a configuration dialog that allows you to add more media players (VLC, Windows Media Player…). Actually you can add any kind of application, you are not limited to media players. You can add a download manager… in this case the video won’t be played, it will be downloaded…

Now I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to use uget. This is free download manager with versions for both Linux and Windows.

It’s possible to play torrents directly in SMPlayer, no need to download the torrent first!

You need to install peerflix. This is a video streaming BitTorrent client. It starts to download the torrent (to a temp folder) and streams the video. Then SMPlayer (or any other player) can play the stream.

Now you have to make this adjustments in the SMPlayer configuration. In Preferences -> Network, disable the option to use the internal support for Youtube, and enable the option to play videos from streaming sites:

Now go to Advanced -> Options for MPlayer/MPV and enter

--ytdl-format=bestvideo+bestaudio

That’s all.

There’s a little problem, in this mode the reported duration of the video is wrong.

A new very interesting feature, thanks to the newly added support for mpv, is the possibility to play videos from many video sites. Youtube was already supported, but now you can play videos from DailyMotion, Vimeo, Vevo and many more sites, just by entering the URL of the video in SMPlayer. Performance is much better in SMPlayer (or any other player) than using the flashplayer in a web browser.

SMPlayer already had support for Youtube, so the Youtube URLs will still be handled by SMPlayer. However it’s possible to disable SMPlayer’s internal support for Youtube. In this case the Youtube URLs will be passed directly to mpv, which actually provides an interesting feature: subtitles are available.